6 Building Server-Side Web Language Processors

Following the thoughts of Ariel Ortiz in my previous post, we know delve into his article “Building Server-Side Web Language Processors”. This article defends the idea of teaching students to learn web language processors because they are more relevant to our current context. In other words, it is better suited for students in this day and age because they will be more prepared to face the problems of the real world via the widely used world wide web.

As stated in the article, we are focused more on the server-side of processing web language and not the client-side. Ortiz writes: “The purpose of a web language is to do some computations and then produce an output in the form of an HTML web page (or XML document, plain text, etc.). This means that a resulting page is built from two types of elements: dynamically generated elements and static content elements” (2) as the purpose of web design. This also helps students get used to using a template view which is web language code embedded in the presentation code. Or in other words, the dynamic elements are embedded in the static elements because of its similarity to the output it produces.

There are also other things to consider while building a web-based language. The HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) becomes a topic to be understood because it is fundamental to web building. It is the request/response between client and server, which are necessary to view what was coded. And related to this topic is the security issues that come with it.

Since the WWW is publicly used, your code can be found and modified if there are no security measures implemented (which would not happen in a command line shell). Therefore, students become aware of the threat lurking on the web and take steps to prevent those threats.

Ultimately, Ortiz’s idea for a web-based language processing could become a more relevant and enticing endeavor than a shell type approach.